


Dense Like Dying Stars

by ladivvinatravestia



Series: We Shall Overcome [2]
Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Discussion of Breasts, Ensemble Cast, Gen, Growing Pains, Implied/Referenced Transphobia, Mentions of Cancer, Redania Room, Trans Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, everybody lives at Kaer Morhen like it's 2012, everyone is poly because witchers, grownups are weird, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:27:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24953764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladivvinatravestia/pseuds/ladivvinatravestia
Summary: All of the Witchers and sorceresses at Kaer Morhen are busy flirting with each other; Ciri and Dara just want to pick out some armor.
Relationships: Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon & Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia
Series: We Shall Overcome [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1806007
Comments: 10
Kudos: 45
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	Dense Like Dying Stars

**Author's Note:**

> For Banned Together Bingo 2020 prompt “Boob Discussion”
> 
> Additional warnings: mentions of past child sexual assault.

Ciri clings tightly to Geralt’s hand as the group descends into the depths of Kaer Morhen. In deference to the fact that Ciri, Dara, and Jaskier are with them, Vesemir is carrying a lit torch, but that only makes the shadows flicker even more ominously against the walls. Ciri tres to imagine what it would be like to be a full Witcher, to be able to see in the low light without a torch, but all she can come up with is how Geralt looked after downing potions to fight off that nest full of arachas on their way from Sodden to Kaer Morhen. Pupils blown out, veins standing out in sharp relief against skin drained of all blood, breathing heavily after the fight as Jaskier spoke to him like a high-strung racehorse. She shudders involuntarily. She doesn’t want the grownups to know that she’s been listening in on their arguments late at night about how best to help her and to secure her future but - she’s not sure she wants to go through all these Trials and mutations they keep speaking of to become a Witcher.

At the end of the hallway, the old wooden door makes a mighty creaking sound as Vesemir pulls it open, and then Ciri’s nose is immediately assaulted by an unmistakable and unpleasant smell.

“Mmm, nothing like the aroma of old, sweaty leather,” comments Lambert.

“Yes, charming,” says Jaskier, although Ciri’s pretty sure he means the exact opposite.

She looks out into the room. There’s still only one torch, so the suits of armor set up on their stands look almost like people, or at least like ghosts, moving in the flickering light.

Coën looks around the room. He says,

“Well, this is all very - utilitarian.”

Ciri can’t tell if he’s trying to be polite, and failing, or being rude on purpose - and if he’s being rude on purpose, why, when he’s a guest.

“Heavy and ugly, you mean?” says Aiden, and that is definitely rude, because Lambert takes a swing at him, but they’re both smiling as Aiden dodges the blow.

Geralt frowns at them and nudges Ciri forward toward a couple of big studded caskets.

“C’mon Ciri,” he says, “let’s leave the children to their fighting and look at some armor.”

“Children -” sputters Lambert.

“Well, I don’t know about you,” says Jaskier, crossing his arms, “but I don’t see any responsible adults in the room.”

“Vesemir -” begins Aiden, then looks around. Vesemir is nowhere to be found.

Eskel and Coën urge Dara forward and he stands next to Ciri while the three Witchers open the caskets. An even stronger smell of what Ciri now assumes is old, sweaty leather wafts out when they do, and Ciri takes an instinctive step back, pushing Dara behind her.

“Phew,” says Eskel, waving a hand over the stinky armor in the caskets and grinning at Geralt, “maybe better if we just start from scratch, do you think?”

Geralt nods his agreement and lets the lid of his casket slam shut, sending dust motes flying everywhere. In the dark corners of the room, Ciri hears things skittering away, and she realizes Geralt has been holding his breath the whole time. Because enhanced Witcher senses also include an enhanced sense of smell. Ciri definitely does not want to become a Witcher.

“Right,” says Eskel, and closes his casket a bit less dramatically. “Crafting diagrams should all be up in the library, let’s go.”

They head back out of the armory. At least, Ciri, Geralt, Dara, Coën, and Eskel head out of the armory. Aiden, Lambert, and Jaskier have all lost their doublets and are grinning far too brightly at each other as they take turns trying to knock each other to the ground. It looks - weirdly sexually charged, considering that Jaskier is supposedly married to Geralt now, but if Geralt understands the reason for Ciri’s hesitation, all he says is,

“Don’t worry about them, they can look after themselves.”

Up in the library, Eskel and Geralt pull out leather cases full of curling manuscripts while Coën teases them about learning all of their Wolf School secrets.

“Oh, I’ll show you some secrets,” says Eskel, pitching his voice low and eyeing Coën up and down.

“Gross,” blurts Ciri, like she’d been in the habit of doing when her grandparents flirted in front of her.

There’s a pause, then all the adults laugh and Vesemir says,

“Little pitchers have big ears.”

Dara is looking - more uncomfortable than he should if it was just a simple case of him not understanding the double entendres. She wonders if it’s somehow related to the conversation she’d overheard but not understood when they first showed up at Kaer Morhen. Jaskier had told the various assembled Witchers not to get any ideas about Dara, and Lambert had immediately got extremely offended and demanded to know “The fuck makes you think we would even ask him?” Jaskier had said he was just making sure, and then the subject had been dropped and, as far as Ciri knew, had never come up again. Still, if he’s feeling uneasy -

“Right,” says Ciri, sitting up straighter and doing her best to channel her Gran on an occasion of state. “No more flirting. We’re here to choose armor. Everyone stay on task.”

The papers are spilled out all over the big reading table and everyone starts shuffling through them. Yennefer and several of the other sorceresses start to show up, as though they somehow know that something interesting is going on. And since Yennefer told Ciri that sorceresses can read minds, that’s probably how they knew. Geralt pulls a pile of papers towards himself and Ciri and starts sorting through them. He’s obviously looking for something in particular, but Ciri finds herself looking even at the ones he rejects. They’re all on old, yellow, curling parchment, the ink fading to brown, the hands they’re written in a century or more old. She’s trying to make sense of a diagram she thinks is labeled “Superior Ursine Trousers” when Geralt lets out a quiet “hmm” - equivalent to a cry of triumph in anyone else, and says,

“Here it is, I knew I kept notes on it somewhere.”

He slides the diagram over to Ciri to take a look, and Vesemir comes over to look over his shoulder. In one hand, quite old, the diagram is labeled, “Feline Armor.” In another hand, which Ciri makes the startling realization is Geralt’s own hand and also at least a century old, several annotations have been made.

“Tch, you young pups, writing all over the library collection,” chides Vesemir, before moving off again to chat with some of the sorceresses.

“I bet they were adorable children, though,” says Triss.

“Little terrors, more like,” grumbles Vesemir, but there’s a fond smile on his face.

“Oh, do tell,” says Keira, leaning in closer.

The edge of Geralt’s mouth quirks up in a smile, then he turns back to Ciri. “This is the style I favored when I was your age,” he begins, “because -”

Aiden, Lambert, and Jaskier burst noisily into the library, looking and smelling exactly like they’ve just enjoyed a quick fuck in a dusty armory.

“And what type of armor have we chosen for our very own little menace?” asks Jaskier, draping himself over Geralt’s shoulder to look at the diagram. Ciri leans away so he won’t get dust and -  _ whatever else _ \- on her by accident.

“Cat,” Geralt says again, this time with somewhat exaggerated patience, “because -”

Aiden, living up to his school’s name, fairly pounces on Geralt’s other shoulder.

“Oh, yes, an excellent choice,” he says. “We Cats like that design, especially for trainees, because -”

Geralt turns his head to look directly at Aiden. It means Ciri can’t see his face, but he says in an absolutely even tone, “ - because when I was growing up, it was easily adjusted to support my breasts when they were growing in.”

Aiden’s face goes through any number of expressions - surprise, confusion, and curiosity - before smoothing back out into his usual affable grin. “And it’s great for an agile, lighter fighting style, which is what Ciri and Dara will want to learn if they won’t be going through the whole course of mutations,” he says.

He claps Geralt on the shoulder and sashays off to join the sorceresses, all of whom are now gathered around Vesemir to listen to his stories of Geralt and Eskel’s childhood antics.

“Sorry, you were probably trying to have a private moment with Ciri, weren’t you,” says Jaskier. He’s no longer so much draping himself over Geralt as he is standing at enough of a distance that they can look each other properly in the eye, although he still has his hand on Geralt’s arm.

“I was,” agrees Geralt, giving him a look that is equal parts exasperated and fond. It’s a look Ciri saw her grandparents giving one another frequently enough.

“Okay, I’ll try to keep everyone else out of your way for a bit,” says Jaskier, and squeezes both Geralt’s and Ciri’s shoulders before making his way over to the rest of the group. Geralt turns back to Ciri.

“Sorry,” he says, “does that - bother you?”

“What, Jaskier - uh -” Ciri probably shouldn’t actually say “fucking,” even if she knows that’s what it was - “sneaking off with Aiden and Lambert?”

From the look on Geralt’s face, that’s  _ definitely _ not what he was asking her if she was bothered about. “That too, I guess,” he says.

Ciri thinks about it. None of the grownups seemed upset. And the only real thing that’s different to what her Gran’s court was like is that nobody is bothering to hide their flirtations with anybody else. If everybody’s open about what’s going on, then nobody can accuse anyone else of lying or proving false. “I suppose,” she says, reasoning it through as she goes along, “it’s like when Jarls on Skellige keep more than one wife at a time?”

“Hmm,” Geralt agrees.

Ciri combs back through the conversation and realizes the other thing Geralt had said that might bother some people.

“You said - you had breasts when you were growing up,” she repeats. She remembers overhearing heated discussions in the palace last year, when the priestesses of Melitele in Cintra had started saying that trans people - that was the word they used for themselves; Ciri didn’t think it was worth remembering the epithets the priestesses had used - were abominations in the eyes of the Goddess and needed to be ritually purified. Mousesack and Granddad, being from Skellige, couldn’t imagine  _ not _ accepting trans people; Gran had grudgingly put out a proclamation offering immunity from the priestesses’ purification campaign, though privately Ciri thought she’d done it only because she didn’t want them all to up sticks for Nilfgaard.

“Hmm,” agrees Geralt again. Ciri notices that, despite Jaskier’s promise to keep the others away for a bit, he and Yennefer have drifted back and are now sitting on the opposite side of the table from them, and Dara has pulled his chair a little closer to Jaskier’s. “I found a surgeon to remove them for me a few years after I set off on the Path.”

“Oh, are we talking about full mastectomies?” asks Sabrina. She drapes herself over the back of Geralt’s chair so that if he were to move his head even an inch to one side or the other, he’d get a faceful of her notably ample bosom. Yennefer and Jaskier look at each other, trading arch smiles.

“It was called top surgery when I had it,” says Geralt, dry as toast. Yennefer puts a fist in front of her mouth to hide a smile, but Sabrina seems unbothered by the revelation. She drops into the chair on Geralt’s other side, but pulls it up close enough to him that her skirts are brushing his legs. He stares across the table at Yennefer and Jaskier as though mere looks can extract him from the situation.

“Well, I had mine cut off because of how common breast cancer is in my family,” says Sabrina, addressing Ciri. “You know what that is?”

Ciri nods, but her answer is a little less confident. “A - mutation that causes uncontrolled cell growth?” she says.

Sabrina nods. “And if you’re going to learn to use any magic, it increases your risk of exposure to mutations,” she says.

Ciri looks over to Yennefer for confirmation. Yennefer nods, and says,

“I’ll show you later how to check for lumps.”

“Anyway,” continues Sabrina,” when I had them reconstructed I asked for them to be made bigger, because I didn’t know that was going to cause me near-constant back pain, so -”

“ - oh, boo hoo,” interrupts Yennefer.

“ - yes, because  _ you _ made such good choices at eighteen,” Sabrina fires back.

“Excuse you, I made  _ brilliant _ choices at eighteen,” says Jaskier, reaching across the table to take Geralt’s hand.

Ciri looks back and forth between them all. If being a grownup is mainly about flirting with some grownups while insulting others, she’s not actually sure she’s in a hurry to become a grownup either. She takes the crafting diagram for the feline armor, and a couple of the other diagrams, and dodges around the grownups and under the table so she can sit next to Dara.

“Forget all that boring grown-up stuff,” she tells him, “which pieces of armor do you like the best?”

She spreads out the diagrams she brought, and he spreads out the ones he’s collected, and they spend some time comparing the advantages and drawbacks of each one.

Later, as they’re heading down from the library to take dinner in the Great Hall, another question occurs to Ciri.

“Hold on,” she asks Geralt, “does this mean I have to become a boy, if I’m going to be a Witcher?”

He turns to look directly at her, pausing so the rest of the Witchers and sorceresses will all get ahead of them. “Are you a boy now?” he asks.

It seems like a very strange question, but Ciri attempts to answer it with the same level of gravitas Geralt is giving it. “No,” she says.

“Then, no, you don’t have to ‘become a boy,’” he says. “You already are who you’re supposed to be.” He takes her hand and smiles at her, and it’s the most approval she thinks she’s ever felt from someone who is supposed to be her parent.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> My head canons re trans Geralt were informed by [Young Wolves](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14001078) by Dreadelion.
> 
> As for why Jaskier might assume that Witchers would consider sleeping with teenaged boys (other than his own personal experience), see [The Trial of the Linens](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20638268) by Dira Sudis (but, y'know, please heed the tags, because it is all about teen Geralt sleeping with adult witchers and then later adult Geralt sleeping with a teen witcher trainee)
> 
> Please visit me on [tumblr](https://ladivvinatravestia.tumblr.com)!


End file.
